Blogpost

Targeting the Fitts Law

Authors:
Harold Thimbleby
Paul Fitts wrote the classic paper in 1954 that laid the foundations for one of the most successful laws in human-computer interaction [1]. The Fitts Law tells us how long it takes to hit something, like tapping a screen button. People take longer to hit something farther away, but they also take less time the larger it is. The law helps designers make almost every interactive technology, from iPhones to PCs, faster to use. Unfortunately, nearly 50 years after Fitts’s untimely death, nearly 60 years after his seminal paper, we still agonize how to write his law. When we hear…

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